


In The Doorway

by reitoei



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:28:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23139256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reitoei/pseuds/reitoei
Summary: Poe meets Ben Solo when he's eleven.Poe meets Kylo Ren when he's thirty three.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28
Collections: The Kylo|Ben x Poe Fanworks Exchange 2020





	In The Doorway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



> As usual this went in a slightly different direction than I had planned, but I hope it hits some of the right notes. I do love to write two people trying and failing to communicate.

Poe meets Ben Solo when he’s eleven. Eight year old Ben is a solemn boy trailing behind his mother, quiet when he’s introduced, his dark eyes fixed on Poe from his spot behind her legs. Poe already adores Leia, who gives him contraband sweets and takes an interest in his collection of New Republic naval ship miniatures. He’s known her since he was five. But he’s never met Ben, the son she talks about often.

“Go on,” says Leia, urging the boy forward, but he shakes his dark head. Young Poe hovers, uncharacteristically unsure of himself. She sighs and tousles Ben’s hair.

Leia greets Poe’s grandfather and the two of them drift away in conversation. Poe hesitates. The boy is left behind, a shadow detached from his source.

“Hi,” says Poe, holding out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

The boy shakes delicately. “Yeah,” he mumbles. Separated from Leia he turns in on himself, shoulders hunched up around his ears in his formal robe and eyes downcast. He’s tall and gangly for his age.

“Do you like flying?” Poe asks him, hopeful.

Ben shrugs. “Sure,” he says, unenthusiastic.

Poe is disappointed by his reticence but resilient enough to shrug it off. “Wanna see my ship?”

“Yeah.” Ben nods, and that’s not a ‘no’ by any stretch, so Poe takes him to the cliffs.

At that age Poe is cheerful, well-socialized, and charms every adult he meets with his easy manner, but in a quirk of personality that carries over to adulthood he has no close friends. He gets along with everyone equally, has none of the usual social clumsiness of kids—none of the rough edges that cause friction or likewise spark bonds of trust. Those are folded away inside him. He carries his troubles privately: the war, the loss of his parents, the childish responsibility that comes with tragedy.

It sets him apart in ways he doesn’t understand. It sends his path spinning off into the stars. And right now, it means he ends up at the cliffs more often than the local school.

“You ever been off-world before?” Poe asks as they trek through the woods.

“Uhuh,” Ben affirms.

Ben has no trouble keeping up at first, but he balks at large obstacles like the trees that’ve fallen across the path or the wide tracts of mud churned by forest-dwelling ungulates. Poe clambers over a log and Ben stops.

“C’mon,” Poe says, impatient.

Ben fiddles with the sleeve of his tunic. “I can’t—my clothes.”

“Oh, who cares?” Poe exclaims, jumping down to the other side. “They’re just clothes.”

Ben shuffles closer. Slowly he puts his hands on the slippery bark and boosts himself up, but without Poe’s agility he struggles, smearing himself with slippery mud as he slides down the other side. Poe grabs his arm and helps him upright. He looks down at his dirty tunic in dismay and brushes at it ineffectually.

He looks so upset about it that Poe can’t help giggling. “It’ll be fine,” he says. “You can wash your stuff back at the house.”

“But my mom…” Ben protests.

Poe slings his arm over tall Ben’s shoulders. “It’s okay. Haven’t you ever gotten dirty before?”

Ben makes a face. “No.”

He bursts out laughing and Ben scowls and ducks out from under his arm, “Don’t laugh at me!”

“Okay, sorry.” Poe nudges him gently. “You’ll get used to being dirty if you hang around here.”

Ben looks dubious but he doesn’t demand to turn back, so Poe leads him onward.

The path isn’t well maintained and it becomes more treacherous as they go on. Undergrowth obscures the way in many places. Poe works hard to keep it clear, but in spite of his efforts it’s still barely more than a deer-trail. Still, he knows the way well enough that he could—and does—walk this path in the dark. He ducks around familiar trees and steps over familiar sinkholes easily while Ben stumbles behind him.

“So I guess you’ve never been to Yavin 4 if you’ve never been dirty before,” Poe says, lifting a massive palm leaf for Ben to duck under.

“No,” says Ben tacitly.

“Do you ever say anything else?” Poe asks.

“Sorry,” Ben mumbles, watching his feet.

Poe chatters aimlessly as they make their way through the final stretch of jungle, and Ben lets him without comment. Poe’s not used to that—in a group of ebullient farmers’ kids, he’s neither the loudest nor the most talkative by far. He’s not sure what to do about it, so he keep talking.

Finally they come out on top of the crevasse. The jungle ends abruptly, giving way without ceremony to shrubs and clinging vines that tumble over the edge of the cliff.

“Wow,” Ben says behind him.

The sweet, sun-warmed blue of Yavin 4’s sky arcs overhead, a shield that encloses only them and the jungle. Below their feet, a creek hurries down the canyon to feed the underground rivers. Poe’s followed it upstream; he knows where it rises from the earth and pools, sometimes strips off his clothes and swims around in the cool, clean spring before he goes home. Around them birds call and take to wing.

He tugs Ben onward. “Come on. This isn’t even the best part.”

They climb down. Ben seems to have abandoned his earlier concern for his clothing, because when he hops down he’s white with limestone dust. Poe’s shirt and pants are in the same state. He beats them briefly and a cloud of dust dances up and away, carried by the updraft.

They’re on a shelf that juts out from the cliffside. Ben looks dubiously down to the canyon floor—it’s far enough that a kid might break his leg if he fell, but not far enough to be dizzying. But the real treasure is here at the midway point: Poe sweeps aside the curtain of vines and behind them is a cave.

The light reveals a budding mechanic’s workshop. Tools and parts are scattered in cheerful chaos among an assortment of machines shaped like birds on a wing, some of them festooned with colourful jungle flowers as if in the middle of a kiddish game, and looming over it all is Poe’s pride and joy—his ship.

Long ago some harried rebel pilot must have ducked into this canyon and landed her wounded craft here—what happened to the person, there’s no answer or sign. Poe discovered the hidden ship when he was no older than Ben. He had snuck away from the house, some instinct driving him to keep his sadness private, or perhaps just in rebellion against the loss of order and uprightness in his small world. He’d come upon the cave by accident. Now, three years later and highly precocious with a welder, he was eager to share his secret with someone from off-world.

Although, hesitatingly, he had to ask—“You won’t tell, will you?”

Ben turned wide eyes on him. “No.”

“This is my ship,” he says, patting her flank clumsily. “She’s an x-wing—the best combat flyer of the Republic.”

“Do you fly?” Ben almost whispers.

“Not yet. But soon!” he exclaims. He’s certain it’ll be soon. “I’ll take you up if you want. You ever flown?”

“We flew in a ship to get here,” Ben says.

“That doesn’t count,” Poe tells him. “I mean real flight, through atmosphere. For fun.”

His own memories of flying are clear as a bell. They’re memories of sitting in his mother’s lap and watching the world rush by, of the swoop and spin of gravity trying to pull them down to sober, stable ground, of her laughing. That’s real flight—flying in spite of the forces holding you back.

Ben shakes his head slowly.

“I can show you,” he tells Ben, and Ben smiles cautiously in return.

As it happens, Poe’s ship isn’t anywhere close to ready for real flight. That’s okay, though, because he has something almost as good: ground-skimmers. These kite shaped and lightweight speeders strong enough to bear one human child or small non-human adult, and Poe has a sizeable collection of them. They’re in various states of disrepair since he often cannibalizes them for parts for the ship, but at least a handful of them have survived this ruthless deconstruction.

Ben’s never seen a ground-skimmer before—Poe shows him how to activate the engine, how to mount and strap in, and how to lean this way or that to control the direction.

“Have you ever fallen?” Ben asks.

“Oh yeah, lots. Falling is better than crashing. It hardly even hurts,” Poe tells him. Ben doesn’t look assured. “If you ever lose control, unclip your straps like this so that you don’t crash.”

He demonstrates. Ben grabs at him as he slides off the skimmer’s smooth back. “I don’t want to fall,” he whines.

“Just go slow,” says Poe.

“Can’t you come with me?”

“I’ll be right behind you.” Poe boosts himself onto the other skimmer and straps in. “Go on, get on top and clip the straps in again.”

Ben does this clumsily, crawling up onto the V-shaped carapace and contorting himself so that he can snap everything back into place. The skimmer hums in anticipation and bobs from his weight. He clings to the two grooves at the top of the V that are meant to be rudimentary handholds.

Poe leans forward and directs his skimmer out of the cave. It’s second nature to him by now—he plummets down the drop-off with a whoop and pulls up sharply at the bottom, barely remembering to slow down and make sure Ben is behind him.

Ben teeters at the lip of the cave, uncertain.

“Just let it go,” Poe shouts.

“But—“ comes the protest, and then it’s too late—gravity tips the balance and the skimmer drops.

“Pull up, pull up!” Poe turns sharply and cuts toward the base of the cliff. If Ben doesn’t pull up in time he’ll just bounce off the shield that keeps the skimmers hovering, but it won’t be fun. And the shield only protects the bottom, so if he goes nose-over-tail then he’s doomed.

Ben hangs on, white-faced, as he makes a swift journey down the cliff face. At the last moment he leans back and the skimmer jerks, righting itself, and he’s suddenly speeding past Poe.

Poe grins. “You got it!”

He hunkers down and pushes his skimmer to accelerate. They dart over the canyon floor neck and neck—but Ben’s a natural, and it isn’t long before they’re racing. Poe dips one wing to the left and executes a spin up the side of the cliff and over Ben’s head, laughing, and Ben takes the advantage and the lead. He’s faster, lighter, leaves Poe in the dust as he tastes freedom for the first time in his young life.

Ben comes to visit with his mother more frequently. They fly, they explore, they swim in the spring under the watchful eye of the incandescent gas giant Yavin. Ben is not an easy companion—reticent, sometimes distant, a boy of few words. But something sparks between them.

The ship lurks in the back of the cave. Poe is happy to be distracted from it. He goes to school more often and stops sneaking out at night to pick apart machines. He turns twelve, thirteen, and then Ben goes away to the Jedi Academy to study under his uncle.

Ben comes back from the Academy infrequently. According to him padawans are not meant to leave the Temple grounds until they become apprenticed, but Luke makes an exception so he can visit his mum. And his mum takes him to visit Poe. Poe’s getting lonely, growing up and apart from the other kids, knowing that he’s doing it and unable to stop himself, so he doesn’t complain even though Ben is temperamental and just as unsociable as ever. They work on the ship and talk about the stars, and flying, and never about Ben’s life in the Temple.

Then there’s a period where he doesn’t come at all. Poe is going on fifteen and getting itchy to leave the school and the farms behind, but he doesn’t know where he’s going yet. The week after his birthday his grandfather gets sick and his mother’s military pension isn’t enough to cover the medical bills, so he packs a bag and takes the mag-rail out to the city where the freight ships come in. He leaves the cave and the canyon behind.

He honestly doesn’t think Ben will come back.

Poe gets a job working in the shipyard during the day and a second job hauling moonshine into the outgoing freighters at night. The days and nights on Yavin 4 are long, so he doesn’t sleep much. He gets paid more than a fifteen year old should; his boss likes him because he’s learned that keeping his mouth shut endears people to him.

He learned that from Ben, actually—if he stopped talking for long enough he could eventually draw Ben out into a real conversation. Sometimes a genuine smile, which he remembers with bittersweet fondness.

He sends money back to his grandfather in the countryside and dreams about hyperspace.

The next time he sees Ben it’s been almost two years.

Poe is seventeen, grown strong and confident from his work. He knows the time is coming for him to leave. His grandfather isn’t getting better—one day word will come for Poe that the last round of treatment didn’t work. He should go back to the property to see him before it’s too late, but there never seems to be a good time. He’s reluctant to leave knowing that there are five more men waiting to take his place. Yavin 4 isn’t a poor planet but it has its fair share of hardship, even in these glory days of the New Republic.

He walks out of the shop one day and Ben’s standing across the street in front of a kef shop like a dream he had once, dressed in a padawan’s drab robe and holding the strap of his bag. A transport speeder sweeps between them, kicking up the street dust into a cloud. Poe shoulders his day bag and crosses the road, grinning involuntarily.

“Ben!”

Ben turns. He’d been staring at the kef display, rows and rows of pods filled with milky kef and a rainbow of fruit, pickles and more exotic things that Poe’s never had the courage to try. His eyes go wide.

“Poe.” His greeting is more subdued than Poe remembers. He sticks out a hand hesitatingly and Poe brushes it aside, pulling him into a clumsy embrace.

Ben’s hands slowly come to rest on his back.

“Stars, what are you doing here? I thought you’d forgotten about this place.”

“I’m about to start my apprenticeship,” Ben says, close to his ear. He’s about at height with Poe even though he’s only fourteen. He’ll go through another growth spurt soon and then he’ll outstrip Poe.

Poe laughs into his shoulder. Ben’s hair is too long and it tickles his face. “So you’re coming round to, what, brag?” He thumps Ben’s back. “I’m happy for you.”

Ben untangles them and steps back. “Once I’m Master Luke’s apprentice I’ll go with him on missions while the others mind the Temple. It means I’ll be away for longer and longer.”

“Two years isn’t long enough?” Twin flames of happiness and frustration vie for space in his heart. He knows Ben can’t spend his life as the only friend of a lonely kid on some forgettable mid-Rim moon—just the same as he knows he’s not going to be that kid forever. But some things you can’t turn off. Fear of being left behind. Fear of losing the people he cares about.

And hell, when did Ben become one of those?

Ben’s face falls and he immediately regrets his words. “I couldn’t come.”

“No, hey, it’s fine.” Poe wraps an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You’re here now. Listen, I’ve got—“ he checks his implant, “a few hours before my next job. Let’s grab some food and find you a place to stay in the city. When did you get here? How’d you know where to find me?”

“I asked around,” Ben says evasively. “I just got in at thirteen-hundred Standard. It wasn’t hard to find you. I just looked for the loudest, most obnoxious mechanic in the port.”

Poe jabs him in the ribs in retaliation and Ben squirms away, and Poe laughs again. It’s familiar but there’s a new tension strung between them; Poe is older and less easy and he’s more thrown than he wants to admit by Ben’s reappearance. He’d relegated his odd childhood friendship to a starring role in dreams he doesn’t really want brought to life. He fantasizes about what would have happened if maybe Ben didn’t live on a different planet, if they could go out to the cliffs every day, if Poe was brave enough to fly his ship, if, if, if. Ben being here isn’t an ‘if’ and that’s scary.

Ben’s answer also doesn’t address how he knew Poe wasn’t in the countryside anymore, but he doesn’t press the issue. It suggests Ben already knows what’s going on in his life to some extent, whether from Leia or from his own obscure sources—he’s a mysterious kid, and the Force makes him more so—which Poe feels some kind of way about.

He takes Ben to a tavern neither of them are actually allowed to be in. It’s packed with off-worlders and coated uniformly with road dirt and it serves cold beer and hot pies. He gets one of each for both of them and sits them at the bar. Ben is stiff and awkward between Poe and a local xanthu pilot whose feeding tubes take up half the bar counter. The pilot is hooking the tube up to his pint-in-a-pod. Poe takes a gulp of his own and sighs thankfully.

He’s just as tired and dirty as any cargo hauler in this joint; he fits in after two years here. Ben’s an outsider here in his clean, soft clothes and his pale human skin.

“So,” Poe says. “You’re gonna be an apprentice, huh?”

Ben nods. “Master Luke says it’s time.”

Poe wolfs down his pie and orders another. There’s no time to eat on shift and he’s always ravenous. Ben watches him out of the corner of his eye—that’s new. He tries to ignore it.

“You ready for it?” he asks.

“I guess.” Ben eats slowly, contemplating each bite. Poe wants to tell him it’s a bad idea to think about what goes into the pies here, but Ben has more to say. “Master Luke thinks I’m ready. At least, I think he does. My lightsaber skills are top of the class and I can sustain myself for weeks on nothing but water and the will of the Force. I ought to be ready.”

What do they teach at the Jedi Temple? Weeks of only water sounds like torture. Poe frowns. “Doesn’t seem like you’re convinced.”

Ben pushes his plate away. “I have to be.”

After that he clams up. Well, Poe has no one to blame but himself for pushing too hard. He finishes his food and Ben’s and pays the bartender, and they go back out into the street.

“Let’s find you a room,” says Poe, who knows of at least one hostel in this area of town that isn’t a front for a brothel and doesn’t have bugs the size of his thumb in every corner. “How long are you staying?”

But Ben hesitates. “I thought—we could go back to the old house.”

“Ah.” Poe feels his mouth twist down into an involuntary grimace. “I can’t, exactly. I have a few jobs lined up.”

“Oh. Okay.” Ben trails after him as he heads toward the distillery district. “I’m here for a Standard week. I told Master Luke that mum would want to see me before I left on the mission.”

“You—“ Poe turns. “Does she know you’re here?”

Did Ben lie to his uncle and his mother to come to Yavin 4? Kriffing hell, he’s only fourteen, and Poe is abruptly, unpleasantly reminded of this. He’s so self-possessed, and always has been. But he shouldn’t be flying alone to far-off moons on a whim.

“Not exactly,” Ben says. “I told her I was going to Coruscant.”

There’s a gleam of defiance in his eye. Poe remembers fourteen, chafing at the bit to be free of school and forging his own way in the world. It wasn’t so long ago, but he had no idea what hardships were waiting for him.

He turns down a narrow alleyway and leads them in a different direction. “C’mon. You can stay at my place. It’s a dump, but it’s got a lock on the front door.”

Which is more than he can say for a hostel, even the least grungy.

Poe pays for the privilege of renting a flat that’s barely more than a room with a mattress, barely twice as wide as he is tall. It’s above a butcher, which is probably why he can afford it; to get up to it he has to make his way through the freezer room and climb a ladder that opens into the space. He pops the hatch and hauls himself through. He barely notices the condition of the place when he’s alone, but Ben’s presence makes him acutely aware of how small it is, how much it smells like the iron tang of what goes on below.

Ben doesn’t say anything, though. He drops his bag next to the mattress on the floor and looks around.

“You can stay here during the day or you can go out and meet me here after my shifts,” Poe tells him.

“I’ll stay.” That doesn’t surprise him—Ben would be eaten alive in the city, Jedi apprentice or no.

“I have to lock you in, so you can’t leave,” Poe warns him. “There’s food, though. And holo-tapes.”

Ben takes the room in with a glance.

“Sure.” He gives Poe a sly look. “No skimmers?”

“No room,” Poe says wryly. He strips off his shirt. “I gotta wash or else they’ll run me off the dock at the next job.”

Ben’s eyes go wide and he turns away. He sits down on the edge of the mattress as Poe runs the hot water and fills the basin at the other end of the room. He takes a quick rag bath and dresses in clean clothes, then he checks the time. Ben is still perched on the mattress. He’s got a book cracked open in his lap; it looks arcane. Poe wonders if he reads because he wants to or because that’s what Jedi apprentices are supposed to do.

On impulse, he reaches down and ruffles Ben’s hair. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Ben looks up at him, pink and mute.

Ben stays the whole week in Poe’s apartment. He’s a distraction, eating Poe’s food and taking up Poe’s limited space with his gangly limbs. His presence is a weight on Poe’s mind. And yet, somehow it’s comforting. He should be annoyed—what seventeen year old wants to spend all his spare time with a kid?—but he’s inexplicably happy. He doesn’t think about it too much.

Ben hangs out in his place when Poe’s working, which is most of the time, and when Poe has free time they go out to eat or just walk around the city. Ben’s never been to a city like this one before and although he’s not expressive, Poe can tell he’s awed. He stares at everything wide-eyed and silent. Poe wants to ruffle his hair again but he doesn’t want it to be weird—he’s trying really hard not to make it weird. He’s never been more aware of the difference in age between them.

“What do you wanna do before you go back?” Poe asks him on the evening before the last day as they crack open a couple packs of the old military rations Poe keeps in his place for lazy day food.

He’s come off sixteen hours of work, seven of it hauling cargo and nine tuning up the big machines that are supposed to haul cargo instead of him. He didn’t work too hard at the last one—he wants a job tomorrow, after all—but he’s dirty, exhausted. Inexplicably, he’s finding himself annoyed that Ben looks so clean and soft. Ben doesn’t even complain about the dirt or the smell or the fact that he’s probably bored out of his mind seventy percent of the time. Poe just doesn’t get it.

“I dunno,” Ben says softly, poking at his mush with a spoon. A sulky frown steals over his lips. “I could stay here, you know. I don’t have to go back.”

Poe guffaws. “Sure, if you want your Uncle Luke and your mum to come drag you out of this hole.”

Ben’s scowl intensifies. “I didn’t ask to be a Jedi. They don’t know where I am, either.”

Poe shrugs, not sure what to say. He didn’t ask to be an orphan with no prospects. What’s there to ask for? Life is what it is. He doesn’t think Ben would understand that, though.

“You can’t stay in my apartment forever,” he says instead. “You’d have to pay rent.”

“I have lots of credit.” Ben’s jaw is rigid.

“Of course you do.” Poe finishes his ration and the package crumples itself into a recyclable cube. Smart nanites—the only thing in his tiny flat with valuable tech. Even his lock is just a bar across the hatch. He can’t lock it when he goes out but it’s fine because nobody would bother to steal from him. He’s got nothing. “Listen, if you’re having some kind of identity crisis I don’t have time for that, so don’t expect me to be around.”

“Why do you work so much?” Ben puts his packet down. “What do you need money for?”

Anger sparks in him. “Because I don’t get things given to me, Ben. I have to make sure there’s money for the doctors and money to keep the property. And I want to get the hell out of this place someday.”

He rocks back on his heels where he crouches. Ben looks away, out the tiny, barred window. His expression is blank again. He’s so hard to read, so unmoved. Like a statue.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Away,” Poe says shortly. Guilt wells in him already. He didn’t mean to snap at Ben, and Ben doesn’t deserve it.

“Are you taking our ship?”

It takes a moment for him to understand what Ben’s talking about. Our ship—the X-wing in the cave. The dream he left behind. She’s not finished; the engine needs parts he couldn’t afford before and definitely can’t afford now that there are bills to pay. She’ll never be finished. The hyperdrive is damaged, and those cost more than Poe could make in a year. She might manage a low atmosphere flight but without the thrusters and the ‘drive she’ll never make it out of the gravity well into open space.

Just like you, his treacherous subconscious whispers.

Poe shakes his head. “Nah. I’ve got bigger plans. I have a contact who’s gonna get me a job as a trader. It’s a great gig, goes all over the system.”

Ben nods slowly. “What about the ship?”

“I dunno.” Poe struggles to find the right words. “I’ll come back here when the job’s over, of course. Maybe I can finish putting her together then.”

“We can,” says Ben. He looks at Poe now, his dark gaze direct. There’s something in his eyes that makes Poe shift uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” Poe agrees, not really paying attention to what he’s saying. “We can.”

Ben turns his whole body toward Poe. He leans in and Poe understands what’s going on a heartbeat before it happens.

Ben’s lips are soft and warm. He smells clean, like soap instead of sweat. He tilts his head and shuts his eyes, his mouth resting as gentle as the brush of a butterfly’s wing on Poe’s mouth. It’s chaste and sweet. He’s so obviously unaware of what he does to Poe.

Poe reaches up unconsciously and touches his face. Then he pulls away.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, leaning back. His lips tingle. There’s a hot ball in his stomach.

He’s not inexperienced—he’s had enough fumbles in the dark to know what it means when his eyes rest too long on Ben’s long, lithe body or the lush bow of his lip or the turn of his athletic calf. He also knows there’s a gulf between them that not even their unlikely friendship can surmount. Their worlds are a galaxy apart.

Ben’s face doesn’t show what he’s thinking when he sits back. The thought flashes through Poe’s head that he’s only a kid, and he doesn’t really mean what he does. He’s probably never had the chance to kiss anyone while he’s been training to be a Jedi apprentice. Poe could be magnanimous and let him experiment—but his sense of self-preservation tells him that’s a stupid idea.

Ben shrugs, barely more than a twitch of his shoulders. “It was a mistake,” he says, but it sounds forced even to Poe.

After that the final day of their visit is stilted. Poe is off-kilter. He keeps touching Ben casually, then remembering the kiss and going hot inside. He’s sure Ben can tell.

Ben is distant, colder than usual. When the call comes for Poe to pick up an extra shift at the dock for someone who didn’t show, he takes it. He tells Ben and gets a blank look in return.

“Alright,” Ben says, but Poe swears he sees a flicker of anger in Ben’s eyes.

He ruminates over it the whole shift as he’s lifting bins from the cargo bay into the trucks, and then on the other end of the shift as he’s lifting bins from the trucks into the magrail car. Maybe he saw it wrong. Ben’s always had a short temper, but he seemed different this time. Calmer.

When Poe gets back to the apartment to find his things scattered and his furniture upturned he understands that Ben was just hiding it better, though.

“Ben?” he calls, pulling himself up through the hatch. “What the hell…?”

There’s a clatter from the tiny bathroom and Ben emerges clutching a familiar bag. Poe scrambles to his feet.

“Ben, give me that—“

“No.” Ben bares his teeth. His colour is high and he’s disheveled, like he’s been rummaging through the whole minuscule apartment. “I found your spice.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Poe says, going toward him.

Ben lifts the bag of spice higher. There’s a hole in the bottom of the bag. A trickle of something that looks like deep blue sand comes out of it. Poe reaches for it and Ben steps back faster than Poe expects. He thrusts out a hand and it’s like Poe’s walked into a wall.

“I’ve followed you. I know where you work and who you’re working for. Did they promise you money? A ship?”

“It’s none of your damn business.” He aims to hurt, and from Ben’s wince it lands. “Give me the bag.”

“Why, so you can ruin your life?”

Poe pushes against the invisible barrier that’s holding him back and it gives way abruptly. Ben stumbles and catches himself against the doorframe. Poe snatches the bag out of his hand.

“You don’t get to judge me. You’ve got no idea what it’s like out here cause you’re holed up in your precious Jedi temple. Well, that’s not the real world,” he says. “The real world is hard and brutal. Sometimes you gotta do things you don’t want to do.”

Ben’s face is blotchy and red. He yanks Poe’s collar and pulls him down with surprising strength. “Why are you such an asshole?” he demands, and kisses Poe again.

It’s the end of that visit.

Poe sees Ben only one more time after that. They're older; twenty-four and twenty-one. Ben's been an apprentice for many years by that point. He's distant in a different way. Poe's not a careless kid anymore and he can't ignore Ben's cool attitude or pretend he doesn't notice that Ben always stands an arm's length away.

Sometimes, nowadays, he wonders if he should've said something. The precocious kid he'd known was still somewhere in that reserved, distant adult. There might have been some magical combination of words that he hadn't put in the effort to find, too scared of his own feelings to pay any attention to Ben's. He imagines Leia indulges in the same thought once in a while.

-

Poe meets Kylo Ren when he’s thirty-three.

Kylo Ren is and isn’t Ben. They bear no similarities for anyone who doesn’t know to look. Ben wouldn’t have ordered the stormtroopers to “Kill them all” and leave the village in cinders. He wouldn’t have torn the location of the map from Poe’s mind with the cruel claw of his Force. He wouldn’t have left Poe to die at the mercy of the First Order.

As Poe lies on the hot sand of Jakku and drifts in and out of consciousness he wonders if he’s wrong. If Ben was capable of those things all along.

Maybe Poe didn’t ever know him.

He doesn't want to believe that.

-

Poe’s woken by the drop in temperature. Night on Jakku is frigid, dipping below zero as the heat of the day is sucked from the desert. He’s shivering so violently that it hurts. It’s obvious as soon as he tries to sit up that he’s been badly injured in the crash. His left leg throbs hotly and he can’t raise his left arm very far from its natural position. A sharp pain spikes through his ribs as he moves. It’s impossible to tell the extent of the internal damage, and that worries him.

But hypothermia is his most pressing problem. He has to get warm somehow, and fast.

He gets to his feet carefully. It’s not easy with one good leg. He pushes through the pain—it might aggravate the injury but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

The faint starlight illuminates the wreckage around him. It’s not nearly enough to account for the body of the TIE fighter. The stormtrooper who helped him escape is nowhere to be seen, either. He must have landed away from the main site of the crash.

He calculates quickly; with the debris arrayed out behind him, the epicentre of the crash has to be off to his right and over the low dune nearby.

But when he gets to the top there’s nothing below but the blank, clean sand. At first Poe thinks he’s gone the wrong way. Then he feels the sand shift under his feet and notices that it drifts like a current down the side of the dune toward the too-flat epicentre. Quicksand. He gets the hell off the top of the dune, ignoring the sharp complaint of his leg as he scrambles down the other side to safety.

Maybe Finn ejected in time—their hurtled downward trajectory is a blur. Poe hopes he wasn’t swallowed by the sand. That’s not a pretty way to go.

Climbing the dune sapped him of a lot of his strength, but he’s warmer now. He staggers in the opposite direction to give the quicksand a wide berth. He has a vague notion to find shelter so he’s not out in the open, but the desert is rich with shadow and illusion and it’s hard to tell if what he’s seeing is potential safety or just another dune.

He walks for long enough that he starts to see strange, jagged irregularities on the horizon. It takes him a while to realize that they’re actually massive shipwrecks from the Battle of Jakku. Star destroyers and flagships are scattered across the wasteland like toys in a giant’s sandbox. At least he can find protection in one of them, if they aren’t riddled with rotting explosives. Or full of dangerous scavengers.

The ground evens out as he goes, becoming hard and pebbled. Here and there it’s been cratered by explosions or fallen debris. Huge arcing pieces of a ship’s hull rise from the earth in claws. He weaves between them as carefully as he can in the dark, wary of the danger but too exhausted to be as cautious as he should be. It’s not long before he notices he’s being followed.

Whoever it is is being careful to stay behind him a certain distance. He’s injured and unarmed—it wouldn’t pose much of a problem to kill him—but his pursuer is nevertheless shy. If he wasn’t hyper-aware of the fact that he’s on an unfriendly planet and most likely has a deployment of Stormtroopers on his ass right now, he might not have even noticed. But every time he turns his head the shadow lurking in the corner of his eye disappears.

“You want a piece of this?” he calls into the silence. “Show yourself!”

His voice echoes through the canyons created by the colossal skeletons around him. There’s no response, of course, and now he’s winded and feels foolish.

His ribs ache constantly. The sharp, hot pain in his leg tells him he’s in trouble. If he still had the ship… If he could get back to D’Qar they’d drop him in a bacta tank and he could float in a healing hibernation for a week. Even if he could make it to friendly territory he’d be able to grab some antibacterials from a clinic. But at this point it’s far more likely that he’ll succumb to his injuries—or die of dehydration. He’s not sure which would be worse.

Night lifts slowly as he stumbles on. He should stop and rest in the shadow of one of these pieces of wreckage, but the knowledge that someone—or something—might just be waiting for a chance to strike drives him on. The sky lightens from indigo to lapis, the stars gently subsumed into the mirror of the atmosphere.

The dawn blurs everything into a dusky charcoal. He’s having a hard time catching his breath. He pauses, bent double, and is overtaken by a wave of dizziness. It’s not far to go to hit the ground; it slams into him like concrete.

Poe wakes a second time in the belly of a hollowed-out star destroyer with no memory of how he got there. Daylight spears through the hull far above him. He’s lying on something that was once the wall of a corridor; it’s made of white fiberglass that’s corroded with time to reveal rusty patches of its inner dura-steel net.

His ribs are worse. At first he thinks it’s the pain that roused him until he hears the whine of an engine.

Cold dread pools in his gut. He tries to sit up and— _stars_ , that’s a bad idea. He falls back with a grunt. The impact jars his wounds horribly and he lies very still for a moment and tries not to breathe deeply. He hisses through his teeth. Sweat beads on his forehead.

The sound cuts out. There are footsteps, and a shadow blocks out the light.

“You’re awake.”

Poe knows that voice. Unhampered by the modulator, it’s deep and without inflection.

This, of course, is the shadow who trailed him the night before—the shadow who’s trailed him for almost two decades.

“Ben.”

“My name is Kylo Ren.” Boots click on the fiberglass. Cool fingers brush his forehead. Poe surprises himself by not flinching. “You have a fever.”

He snorts, although it hurts to do so. “What do you expect? I’m all cut up and I wasn’t supposed to be planet-side for more than a few standard hours.”

This whole mission has been a monumental cock-up, and now he’s dying in a desert for his trouble. Leia’s going to be so disappointed. He can almost feel the infection burning its way up his leg; alien bacteria don’t fuck around. The emergency vaccine lab in his ship is halfway around the planet and probably burnt to a crisp.

“What do you want, Ben? Leave me to die in peace.”

“Don’t call me that.” It sounds strangled. Another drifting touch across his forehead, lifting strands of hair. It’s gone a heartbeat later.

Poe opens his eyes. A ghost stands over him, dark brows pulled low over his downcast eyes. Ben—Kylo Ren—is different from the last time Poe saw him and heart-wrenchingly familiar at the same time. His hair is longer, the lines of his face sharper. He’s broader and taller than the last time they stood face to face. Poe’s glad he’s lying down, because seeing him he forgets to breathe for a second.

Ren sinks to the floor slowly and sits cross-legged beside Poe.

“You knew who I was,” he says.

“Yeah.” There’s no point in denying it.

“You didn’t say anything.”

What would he have said?

“You knew, too,” Poe says. It’s not so hard to reconcile hesitant, monosyllabic Ben Solo with this new vision when he can’t meet Poe’s eyes. “You knew the whole time they were torturing me—you knew when you stole Resistance secrets from my head.”

Ren’s gloved hand clenches on his knee. “ _She_ told you not to say anything.”

“Leia?” Poe fights down a laugh. It would hurt like hell to laugh right now. “No, she didn’t. I did that all on my own.”

She had no idea Ben was even in this quadrant of the galaxy. Leia doesn’t talk about her son. Just like Poe doesn’t talk about the kid who used to be his friend—his only, unlikely friend, once upon a time.

Ren meets his gaze. His dark eyes are as unreadable as always. “I thought I was strong, you know,” he says, like it’s a confession.

He clenches his hand again, some kind of convulsive tic. Poe’s eyes are drawn to it. Ben was always still as a Jedi, but Kylo Ren seems to be barely restrained. “I was wrong. I couldn’t stop myself from following you. I know you’re just an artifact of my weakness.”

Poe turns his head away at last. He can’t say he likes seeing this new person in the shell of Ben’s body. “I’m not—whatever you think I am. I’m my own person. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“I _know_ ,” Ren growls. He sighs through his nose and falls silent. His hand works.

Whatever he’s trying to say, Poe is too damn exhausted to process it right now. Seeing Ren’s face has only stirred up all the old feelings he thought he’d put to rest: the sick betrayal, the hurt and conflict. The guilt. His eyes drift shut as the fever surges with fresh strength as if sensing his capitulation. If it’s revenge or absolution of some kind that Ren wants he’s going to get it soon enough, because without medical attention Poe’s not going to last long.

“Don’t go to sleep.” Ren grabs his arm abruptly—the bad arm. Poe is jolted out of his daze and he cries out in pain. Ren yanks his hand away like he’s been burned. “You’re injured.”

“You noticed,” Poe says sardonically through gritted teeth.

“Did they—?”

Poe wonders how someone can be squeamish about torture but not ordering the deaths of dozens of innocent people. “Your people didn’t waste the effort. It was the crash landing that did me in.”

“Stay here.” Ren stands up.

“Not going anywhere,” Poe gets out, but Ren is gone into the shimmering heat of the day like a wisp of smoke.

Ren force feeds him a packet of high-grade military meds that are meant to heal broken bones on the battlefield. It’s not a pleasant process: tiny nanites are designed to rush through the body and knit together bone, ligament and muscle. They chew up anything that’s bad or infected and spit out healthy tissue. Suffice it to say, it hurts more than the initial injury.

Poe spends three days shouting himself hoarse, then falls into a deep, exhausted sleep. He barely notices whether Ren is there or not, except that someone drips water into his mouth occasionally.

He doesn’t expect Ren to be around when he finally drags himself out of his coma. There’s a reason the First Order is looking for the map and it doesn’t make sense for the Master of the Knights of Ren to hang around Jakku for nostalgia’s sake. So he’s surprised when he crawls out of the wreckage at last to find Ren crouched on an outcropping above the hole in the hull like a watchful bird of prey.

He shields his eyes from the sun. Ren straightens and jumps down when he spots Poe. There’s a tense moment when he lands in a crouch and his hand goes to his hip where the lightsaber hangs in its holster. Does he expect Poe to attack him? They might be on opposite sides of a conflict but Poe’s unarmed, and besides that he’s weak as a newborn bantha on his freshly healed leg. He raises his hands and steps back. Slowly, Ren drops his hand from his ’saber.

They face each other silently.

“Thank you,” Poe says finally.

Ren nods shortly. “What will you do now?”

Poe hesitates. “I don’t think I should tell you that.”

A flash of something like hurt crosses Ren’s face. He has no right to be hurt. Poe hates that he feels guilty for that look.

“You’re twenty kliks away from the nearest population centre,” says Ren. “You have no map, no water and no food. Your body just healed itself at hyper-speed. There are five separate scavenger gangs within this territory. So what are you going to do?

Poe folds his arms across his chest defensively. It doesn’t escape his notice that Ren’s gaze flickers to his biceps.

“I need a ship so I can find BB-8 before your goons and get back to the Resistance base.” It’s not that much of a secret—Ren knows what his mission is already.

“Your mission was a failure. The droid is gone and the map is missing with him,” Ren says.

“Saying it doesn’t make it true.” Poe shrugs. “BB’s clever and fast enough to avoid anyone wearing white polycarbonate armour.”

Ren steps forward. “I could stop you.”

“You can’t order me around like one of your soldiers, bud,” Poe tells him. “Even if you did just save my life.”

“No. But physically you’re no match for me,” Ren says, almost offhandedly. This definitely isn’t Ben, who was a shy, uncertain kid. This is just Kylo Ren flexing his power.

It makes Poe ice cold. It sends a little thrill through him, too.

“What would you do, take me back to command central?” Poe pushes back. He’s always liked a bit of danger, that’s his problem. “Let them torture me for more Resistance secrets?”

“I don’t care about your secrets,” Ren says dismissively.

“Then what? You wanna keep me locked up in your personal rooms like a pet?” he needles Ren. “Is that how they do things in the First Order?”

He’s hit a nerve. Ren’s eyes snap up and he has Poe up against the rotting steel wall in an instant. He pins Poe to the wall with an impossibly strong arm across his collar. He digs his fingers into Poe’s shoulder. “Would you want that?” he says, barely more than a whisper.

Poe stiffens. “Nobody wants that.” He tries to keep his voice steady, but his heart thunders from the proximity. He’s not sure if it’s fear or anticipation.

Ren’s arm falls away. “Of course not.”

He withdraws, leaving Poe hot with something he doesn’t want to think about. How fucked up is it that he wants Ren even now—in fact, almost more than before? Maybe he has to accept that time has changed both of them, and not for the better.

“Listen, just let me go and there’s a good chance I’ll have my throat cut by gangsters halfway to the nearest shipyard anyway,” Poe says with more flippancy than he feels. “You won’t have to dirty your hands.”

“I wouldn’t—“ Ren says, cutting himself off abruptly. He takes a deep breath. “I’ll fly you to the Colonies.”

Poe grimaces. “Sorry, but three days alone on a ship with you doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time.” He’s only partially lying. He can’t risk it—if Ren can read his mind he could pull the location of the Resistance base out of Poe.

Ren pulls back further, almost recoiling. He turns on his heel and paces away, spins back, full of frenetic energy. “Why not?”

“You’re part of the _First Order_ , Ben. I can’t trust you. Why the hell would I let you take me anywhere?”

“What if I get you a ship?” Ren says.

“Why are you so bent on helping me?” Poe pushes off the wall. He’s not sure what answer he expects, but it’s not the one he gets.

“Supreme Leader Snoke says I should cultivate my innermost desires.” Ren runs his gloved hand through his hair and tugs on it. He’s frowning like the words personally offend him. “Avarice and greed are reflections of our true nature and I must foster them. I’m still not ready to be his apprentice—I want to master my emotions when I should let them consume me.”

He resumes pacing.

“I never meant to see you again because you made me weak. But now I see that Snoke is right—in order to achieve true power I have to understand what I really want.”

“And what you really want is—“ Poe shakes his head. “To help me escape?”

Ren whirls on him. “You don’t understand. He’s in my head. He’s always there, speaking in my ear. How can I know what I really want, unless I’ve wanted it since before _him_?”

Something hot rushes over Poe. He steps back as if physical distance will make the impact of the words less. “Okay. Hear me out. I don’t want anything to do with whatever fucked up line that monster is feeding you.” He has some stronger words, but Ren’s expression darkens so he hastens to continue. Whatever Snoke did to Ben to turn him away from the people who cared about him happened in the past; Kylo Ren exists in the present. “ _But_ I do need to find BB and get the hell off Jakku before someone crazier than you finds me. So if you wanna get me a ship in order to straighten out the existential crisis you’re having and make your fascist mentor happy in some twisted, roundabout way, then… hell, let’s do it.”

For a moment he thinks he’s gone too far. Then Ren nods shortly.

“Fine. Follow me.”

Ren leads Poe to his ship, a sleek, Upsilon-class command shuttle painted wingtip to wingtip with an expensive radar-deflecting coating. Poe recalls that the _Finalizer_ was similarly outfitted with high-end tech and toys. Even TIE’s can run up to five times as much per ship as an X-wing. The First Order is getting substantial funds from somewhere, and for the first time he wonders exactly how much Leia knows and how she’s hoping to play her cards. She’s a master strategist—that’s not Poe’s job for a reason—but he hopes to hell she has an ace up her sleeve.

“We’ll take the skimmer,” says Ren. “The ship is too recognizable.”

“You’ve got troops down here,” Poe realizes.

“Yes,” Ren grunts. “Hux. He sent a squad to look for the droid.”

“Great. Never a dull moment on Jakku, I guess.”

Ren’s skimmer is just as black and gleaming, and Poe nearly rolls his eyes when he sees it. “You’re a cliche,” he says.

Ren just looks confused. “It’s the fastest one.”

“And you’re the heir of a wealthy family of politicians, I get it.” This was one of the reasons he and Ben used to snipe at each other when they were kids.

“Do you want to get there quickly or not?” Ren says irritably. He climbs on and clips his helmet buckle in.

“Well.” Poe swings his leg over the passenger saddle. “How fast does it go, exactly?”

“Fast enough.”

He can hear the smirk in Ren’s voice.

“Show me.”

He holds onto the straps that stick up from either side of the saddle, but it quickly becomes obvious that they’re not designed to be useful at anything over a hundred and fifty kliks per hour. And Ren isn’t kidding about the speed. Poe gives up on decency and grabs hold of Ren’s solid waist. The skimmer is so responsive Ren zips around obstacles with hardly more than a twitch of his arm in one direction or the other. If Ren’s even the slightest bit interested, Poe thinks with dismay, he’s definitely going to do something he shouldn’t.

They stop when the sun reaches its zenith. It’s the hottest part of the day, and Poe is fading. His adrenaline is wearing off. He’s ready to sleep for another two days. He stumbles as he dismounts, barely catching himself. Ren grabs his elbow.

“What is it?”

“Stars, I just woke up from a healing coma,” Poe says. “That’s what. Do you have water and food in those bags?”

Ren lets go of him and turns away to rummage through the bag. He comes back with a transparent bag of cold sludge that Poe regrettably recognizes as something worse than military rations: long distance travel rations. It’s a nutritious but unpleasant sort of porridge with enough liquid content to serve as both food and water, and he hates it with a passion. Ren hands one to him.

They break in the shadow of an AT-AT. The fallen walker is little more than a carapace so thoroughly has it been picked over, but it provides relief from the heat. Poe lays back against the sand and drops an arm over his face.

“I assume you won’t run me through if I take a nap,” he says.

There’s a shuffle from beside him, and abruptly an arm comes down on his other side as Ren braces himself over Poe. “Why do you keep saying things like that?”

Slowly, Poe uncovers his eyes. Ren’s hair tickles his forearm. He’s scowling.

“I use humour to cope,” he says. “Haven’t they heard of humour in the First Order?”

“I guess not,” Ren says quietly. He doesn’t move away.

Poe reaches up slowly. He brushes over Ren’s hot cheek. “Do you ever remember to have fun?”

“I’m having fun right now.” Ren turns his face into Poe’s hand. His dark lashes flicker.

“Me, too,” Poe says hoarsely, and he’s not even lying.

His thumb ghosts over the arc of Ren’s fine cheekbone and he slides his fingers down to cup the curve of his jaw. Ren’s pulse jumps under his touch. He dips his head and they’re kissing, warm and soft and gentler than Poe would have expected.

Ren licks into his mouth like he owns it, delicate and yet relentless. Poe finds himself chasing him when he pulls away, pulling him down with one hand wound in his hair. Ren growls low in his throat and bites not so gently at his lip. It’s a far cry from the first time Ben kissed him, and thinking of the juxtaposition unexpectedly makes Poe shiver.

Ren noses up along his jaw and licks the soft spot where it meets his neck. Poe tightens his grip and arches his head back.

“Okay,” he says, breathless. “Okay, do you have anything?”

Ren pulls back. He’s faintly flushed all down his neck and his gaze is suddenly sharp. “You want—?”

Poe lets out a huff of laughter. “Haven’t you ever wanted to be fucked after a near-death experience?”

Ren is still. Poe pays attention—really looks at him—and sees his confusion. “No, I... haven’t. Ever. I’ve never been with anyone.”

“Oh, _hell_.” Poe reels him in.

This time Ren submits to him, going loose and pliant even though he’s the one on top. Poe fumbles under his tunic but only finds more clothing; he digs his fingers into Ren’s hip instead.

“Is this okay?” He breaks away, panting.

“ _Yes_ ,” Ren says emphatically. “I’m not a virgin. I’ve just never done that.”

“Good. Alright. Let’s—“ he goes for the tunic again and the fastenings simply evade him. “What _is_ this thing?”

Ren smirks. “It’s high-calibre body armour.”

“Can you take it off?” Poe demands. He slides one hand down to the inseam and up again, and Ren shudders.

“Yeah,” he breathes.

He sits back in a crouch and makes short work of the tunic, discarding it in a heap. Underneath he’s wearing a second thick shirt that unbuttons down the front, with armoured panels sewn into the heavy fabric. Poe watches avidly as he strips that one off, too.

Ren pauses at his waistband. Poe beckons him back. “Allow me.”

When he finally gets his hand in Ren’s pants Ren gasps and drops to his knees. He’s hot and silken in Poe’s palm, sticky at the tip already. Poe sits up and pulls him out. Ren reaches out and grabs his wrist.

“I’m just gonna show you something nice,” Poe says, looking up at him.

Ren makes a strangled noise and his fingers tighten reflexively around Poe’s wrist.

“All good?” Poe murmurs.

“Poe,” Ren says quietly, with an edge of desperation.

Poe bends in half and takes Ren’s cock into his mouth smoothly. Ren cries out. He pulls Poe’s hand away, which, well, sometimes it’s easier to do this with an extra hand, but Poe doesn’t exactly mind being manhandled either. He works Ren over until he’s making noises that are probably illegal to record in twelve different star systems and his hips are moving subtly of their own accord. Ren is sloppy, wet, which is typical of someone who’s so wound up he wears two layers of body armour at all times.

Ren tugs at his hair and urges him off. “I can’t, I want to see you,” he says, and Poe isn’t going to say _no_. He strips off his own shirt and Ren is pushing him back, leaning over him to tug his pants down and expose him. His gaze flickers over Poe avidly.

“Feeling greedy yet?” Poe asks, reaching up to brush his knuckles against Ren’s soft mouth.

Ren bites him gently. “Always, for you.”

Which does things to Poe that he _really_ doesn’t want to think about. Maybe Ren is exaggerating, saying things that he thinks his lovers like.

It seems much more likely that this is the raw, unvarnished truth spilling out as Ren pursues what he thinks is control over his inner demons. And somehow, it involves Poe.

He pulls Ren down and arches into him, losing himself in the slow slide of skin over skin. There are a million good reasons not to want more than this.

Ren kisses him as they move together, hands wound in Poe’s hair. Poe gets his hand around them both and it’s good, slippery and sparking hot in his core. He loses himself quickly and spurts up over Ren without warning. Ren buries his face in Poe’s neck and thrusts roughly into Poe’s fist with a groan. He comes a heartbeat later and shudders through it.

Ren slumps onto him. After a few minutes Poe worries that he’s fallen asleep—but no, he stirs and sits up slowly. He looks down at the mess they both have on their stomachs and grimaces. Poe grins wryly.

“Here.” He wipes his hand on Ren’s high-tech outer tunic.

“That’s a thousand credit piece of clothing.” Ren takes it anyway and wipes himself off.

Poe unfolds and refolds his shirt into a pillow. “Now I’m definitely going to take a nap.”

Ren nods. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You could nap, too,” Poe suggests, keeping his tone light.

“I’m the master of the Knights of Ren,” he says, lifting his eyebrows. “I don’t nap.”

“Ben.” Ren stiffens, and Poe reaches out and lays a hand on his forearm. “Kylo. You’re human, not a droid. You’re allowed to sleep.”

“I’ll keep watch,” Ren repeats, getting to his feet.

Poe sighs and lays back on the hard ground. He watches Ren stroll out along the AT-AT’s long, prone legs, keeping to the shadow. He’s different—or else Poe didn’t ever really understand him. But that doesn’t stop Poe from hoping. Just like Leia could never stop hoping.

Maybe Ren knows that.

Maybe, Poe thinks, he’ll come around to it.

-

_When Poe’s grandfather dies he goes back to Yavin 4. He very nearly doesn’t; this isn’t the type of life you take time away from. He’s not in a good spot these days. He’s indebted to the crew for the ship he uses to smuggle spice back and forth between the mines and the distributors, and he’s had a few run-ins with the law in the Colonies. He has a bad habit of drinking too much and betting too high. Still, the guilt is strong enough that in the end he goes._

_He doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going—bad enough they know his real name. He’s been bio-imprinted in a couple different databanks but thankfully the Republic’s bureaucracy doesn’t extend to centralized law enforcement yet. Yavin is still safe for him. And if the job isn’t there when he comes back—well, sometimes he wonders if that wouldn’t be better. Sure, he’d have to lie low for a bit, but maybe it would be good for him. He could get his life in order. He often feels like he’s on the verge of messing up in a big way._

_The port city of Yavin 4 where he lived more than five years ago is smaller and dirtier than he remembers. He takes the magrail out of town to where the jungle is thick and the air is moist with the promise of rain. The smell hits him when he gets off the train: hot, damp, and green. He takes a deep breath._

_He’d planned to visit the tree first, but something tells him he should stop by the house. He’s only going to be there long enough to settle the estate and sign the property over to a broker; he should at least make sure it isn’t in a state of disrepair. But when he reaches the property there’s a skimmer in the front yard. On the front stoop, a figure unfolds._

_“Poe,” says Ben._

_“Ben.” Poe shoves his hands in his pockets. He’s changed but Poe recognizes him instantly._

_A smirk hovers around the corners of Ben’s lips. “That’s it?”_

_“I wasn’t expecting you.” In spite of himself he finds he’s smiling back._

_“I thought I was rid of you, too, but business brings me here.” Ben picks up his bag. “I’m sorry about your grandfather.”_

_“What business?” Poe asks._

_Ben holds out a holocube. “It’s from my mother. The New Republic Navy just lost five pilots in a skirmish in the Unknown Regions.”_

_“What does that have to do with me?”_

_“She asked if I knew any pilots,” Ben says._

_“She wants me to join the Navy?” Poe very nearly gapes at him. He’s a wanted criminal in some parts of the Inner Rim. That record doesn’t just go away. “I can’t. They’d never let me.”_

_Ben shrugs. “My mother usually gets what she wants. Think about it.”_

_Poe takes the holocube, reeling. He doesn’t believe in predestination, or fate, but sometimes he gets a_ feeling _—a gentle nudge suggesting he go left instead of right. The holocube is warm from Ben’s hand. Ben frowns faintly down at him._

_“Come on,” Poe says finally. “I have another stop to make. You may as well come with me.”_

_Ben follows him silently. In all the times he came to Yavin 4 Poe never took him to see the tree. It’s… different, for him. Sacred. He leads Ben down the long, winding path in the opposite direction from the canyon and across someone else’s fields. It stands at the top of a natural hill. The jungle thins out around it, as if giving the tree space. It’s obviously not native; right now, during Yavin’s spring, it blooms with sweet-smelling white flowers the size of his thumbnail. Later it will leaf and bear equally tiny fruit._

_Poe leaves his things at the bottom of the hill and climbs it with Ben in tow._

_“What is it?” Ben asks when they reach the top. He looks up at the graceful tesseract of branches. Light filters through the clusters of blossoms and turns his dark eyes clear and brown._

_“It’s my mother’s tree,” says Poe._

_Ben turns to him. “I can feel it. Through the Force.”_

_Poe smiles. “Yeah. That’s her.”_

_He puts his palm to the rough bark. Warmth flows through him from that point of contact, replenishing him. He reaches out a hand to Ben. “Here.”_

_Ben takes his hand, and for a moment they’re connected._


End file.
